First they came for Sir John A…

And once we’re done with St. John A., let’s go for William Lyon Mackenzie King, who may have helped us win World War II but kept Jewish migrants out of Canada in the 1930s ....

Cartoon by Malcolm Mayes

Lisa Helps must feel a sense of satisfaction. The Mayor of Victoria has just got her city council to remove a statue of Sir John A. Macdonald from the entrance to City Hall.

But her self-described goal of “rewriting history,” getting rid of all those uncomfortable bits of history that upset some people, has clearly only just begun. We’re surrounded by history, some of it unpleasant, and just like Sir John A., Helps clearly believes it needs to be all rewritten or alternatively, just hidden.

Victoria city council voted on Thursday by a margin of 7 to 1 to remove the statue and put in storage as a form of reconciliation with Indigenous peoples. According to Helps, getting rid of the statue, showing Sir John A. in quite a jaunty pose, will eliminate for Indigenous Canadians “a painful reminder of colonial violence every time they enter city hall.”

Sir John A., for those of you who failed Canadian history in primary school, can be considered the founder of Canada, its first prime minister and the driving force responsible for linking the country with a transcontinental railway. He also represented Victoria as a Member of Parliament.

But in 2018, all that counts for little. Instead, the narrative is Macdonald drank too much, had a soft spot for corruption, and helped establish the residential school system for Indigenous Canadians, which we all know now had devastating consequences for communities and individuals. So Sir John A. must now be expunged from our consciousness, a la Harvey Weinstein.

The movement to get rid of Sir John A., got its start in Ontario, naturally enough, where Macdonald spent his formative years. The Elementary Teachers Federation of Ontario wants his name removed from schools in the province because his name creates “an unsafe environment for children.” Huh?

There’s clearly lots left to do, like get his name off Ottawa’s airport, the main bridge linking the capital to Quebec and the parkway along the Ottawa River. And while we’re at it, how about obliterating his face from the $10 bill? Why not replace it with a more popular visage of Canada like Celine Dion or Sidney Crosby, perhaps.

And once we’re done with St. John A., let’s go for William Lyon Mackenzie King, who may have helped us win World War II but kept Jewish migrants out of Canada in the 1930s and interned the Japanese during the war. We can always bulldoze his former estate in Gatineau Park and sell it to real estate developers.

Back to Victoria, where the mayor should get busy on the next step in rewriting her city’s history. How about the name Victoria itself? As an M.A. in history, she should know that her fair city was named for “Queen” Victoria, the ultimate symbol of colonialism and imperialism. Not only was Victoria heir to an undemocratic form of government, she ruled over an often-brutal colonial empire and was actually proud of turning half of the world atlas British red.

Talk about a painful reminder of colonialism. Plus there was all that sexual repression and overwrought architecture linked to the Victorian Era. If Macdonald needs to be put in storage, so should Victoria. And while we’re at it, can we change the name of the city’s newspaper? It’s insensitively called The Times Colonist. And the Empress Hotel? It has got to go too.

Once we’ve eliminated Victoria, how about moving on to British Columbia. Can you think of a less inclusive name for a province that’s Canada’s door to Asia? What about everybody who’s not British who makes the province home? And Columbia? Apparently, the name has its roots with Christopher Columbus, who started the whole nasty business of colonizing America with those three little ships. If only he could have stayed in Genoa.

There’s a movement underway in several U.S. cities to get rid of all statues of Columbus, who’s accused of genocide and murder for his actions in colonizing the continent. If white men hadn’t found the place, imagine how many problems could have been avoided!

Jack Knox, a columnist with the Times Colonist, has got a jump-start on the provincial renaming issue, and recently asked readers for suggestions.

The most popular alternatives were boring variants on Cascadia and Pacifica, the bland names that are popular on both sides of the border to indicate that part of the continent. The other problem is that Pacifica is the brand name of a gas-guzzling SUV, sure to upset the province’s ecologically-minded citizens.

Some readers suggested dropping the full British Columbia name but keeping the initials, either as BC or BeeCee or changing the name and keeping the initials. Among my favorite suggestions are Bud Central, Best Cannabis or Basically China.

Once we’ve renamed Victoria and British Columbia, there’s still the big one—Canada. According to historians, it comes from Kanata, the Indigenous term for “village” that Jacques Cartier came across when exploring modern-day Quebec City. He liked the name so he decided to brand the whole country as Canada. Talk about cultural appropriation!

Getting rid of all the unpleasant parts of our history might make Lisa Helps feel better. But once everything is made neat and tidy, we’ll have no idea of who we are and where we came from.

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The views, opinions and positions expressed by all iPolitics columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of iPolitics.

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33 comments on “First they came for Sir John A…”

I went to school at a time when Macdonald and the Fathers of Confederation were all held up as exemplars of great men. My teachers were as brainwashed as I was.
We were taught little about Indigenous peoples and certainly nothing about the residential school system. Not to mention nothing about the role of women in the country’s history.
I support revisionist history, owning up to the past, and the removal of statues and other monuments that are out of synch with contemporary thinking. There are better things to celebrate in the public arena.
I was very glad, for example, when the City of Halifax voted to remove the statue of Edward Cornwallis, a military officer who issued a scalping proclamation offering a cash bounty to anyone who killed a Mi’kmaw person. The city has convened a committee, including representation from Indigenous communities, to repurpose the site.

This issue rests on two equally preposterous theses. The first is that, as Alan Freeman points out, we can impose today’s standards of political correctness on historical figures and times; thus reveals the general populations’s extraordinary lack of knowledge about history . The second is that removing references to the past will somehow “reconcile” natives and non-natives in Canada. Leaving aside the question of whether all natives need to be “compensated” more that they already have been by the billions of dollars already given by taxpayers to the people who actually attended residential schools, the meaning of “reconcile” is to bring two different parties together to resolve differences. The broader public has already done plenty. What are the natives doing to “reconcile” with the rest of us?

First of all, the term “native” is extremely paternalistic. Are you purposely using that term to denote your lack of regard for this large community? Secondly, the First Peoples of this nation did try to reconcile with the Europeans when then arrived on Turtle Island. Europeans responded with disease, guns, and judgment. Also, could you please point me to the source(s) you are referencing when you state that taxpayers gave residential school survivors “billions of dollars”? Clearly you’ve been reading the history lessons of the past that list Sir John A. MacDonald as a hero and the Indigenous peoples as “savages”. However, you are right about one thing – the general populations lack of knowledge about history. Clearly, you are part of that general population.

It’s self-inflicted. How can anyone scratch out a living in these small isolated places. Insane and destructive. Join the modern world. Newfs left the out-ports because it was not sustainable.
Or go back a thousand years and live off the land. Those days and skills are gone. Long live Nanook.

Indigenous calls to remove statues and names of politicians of yesteryear might successfully emphasize that they have been victimized, often vis a vis their ancestors’ persecution by the state, but, in addition to rankling those who still harbour racist prejudices—who are a considerable minority that happens to be at least thrice the number of all indigenous citizens— ‘social justice warriors’ like Victoria Mayor Lisa Helps (who may be affecting her position purely for political advantage) effectively supply a sop to white Canadians, allowing them to feel better about themselves by pretending to support a social justice cause when, in fact, the removal of supposedly ‘offensive’ historical monuments does as close to absolutely nothing about social injustice as can be imagined.

Instead of trite and hackneyed symbolism, non-indigenous Canadians need to be reminded that righting social injustices against indigenous people requires almost infinitely more from them as taxpayers than the relegation of historical monuments to out-of-sight places. The slate of debt Canada owes First Nations is not reduced one itota by such ‘politically correct’ surrogacy.

Nice verbose platatude….
Wtf does “slate of debt” even mean. Even the Indians would tell you to “f##$ off. Reconciliation is all about dollars which is in itself ironic because it was the settlers that were able to extract true wealth from the land that benefited many and not just see the land for some ritualistic quaint mythical spirits.
That said you are correct about the faux feel good initiatives of our social justice warriors. The grand groper be the saddest example.

So this new version is more to your liking. So tell me what were the contibution of the Indians to humanity? So will your version see them as stoneage village dwellers that commited atrocities in and against themselves?

I have no problem with taking down an offensive statue on public property. Wine on Conservatives. We are entering the second decade of the 21st century. Canada is the first post-national country…. Hopefully we knock the Queen off our currency in short order.

I would prefer we move these statues to a more appropriate place, removing prominence and then affixing to them plaques that outline the full picture of these historical figures – founder of modern-day Canada, yes; but at great expense to her native peoples, an emphatic yes, too.

Our objective should be to correct for the white-washing, but not to erase our history, warts and all.

Sure, take Laurier, King statues down along with Macdonald. They had the power to end the residential school system, but they kept it in place, and by this time, they knew the effect they were having. Will the Liberal’s whine about this?

This is fact-selection on the part of this Victoria Mayor and I hope others just stop it. I read the two volume set that R. Gwynn wrote on JA. Clearly, he would not be a politician we should emulate today but even his policies toward FN, misguided by today’s standards, were far more humane than the extinction policy that was being followed by the USA. I have a real problem judging people/leaders of yesterday by the standards of today – it seems all so revisionist and selective.

Bang on Mr. Freeman….but let’s also go after the bikers who wear helmets shaped like WW2 German military helmets. While we’re at it we may as well dig up the remains of soldiers who fought for things, governments and ideologies we find reprehensible…the Confederate states, Nazi Germany, Italy or Japan during WW2, even though their graves fall under the same international rules and care for war graves as our soldiers do. Dig Em up and dump them in unmarked graves. Erase it all while we’re on a roll.

Join the conversation. It gets feisty!

Author

Alan Freeman is an Honorary Senior Fellow at the University of Ottawa’s Graduate School of Public and International Affairs. He came to the U of O from the Department of Finance, where he served as assistant deputy minister of consultations and communications. Alan joined the public service in 2008 after a distinguished career in journalism as a parliamentary reporter and business journalist for The Canadian Press, The Wall Street Journal and The Globe and Mail. At the Globe, he spent more than 10 years as a foreign correspondent based in Berlin, London and Washington.